The Passover Haggadah הגדה של פסח

"And you shall tell your son on that day"—the commandment to tell of the Exodus, and the Haggadah is the order of that telling. Its basis is in the Mishnah: the four cups, the four questions, Rabban Gamliel's rule that whoever has not said three words—Pesach, matzah, maror—has not done his duty, and the chief instruction: begin with the shame and end with the praise.

How it took shape. The Haggadah did not become a separate book at once: first it stands as a part of the siddur of Rav Amram Gaon, then in Rambam at the end of the laws of Passover. The text grew: the midrash on "an Aramean sought to destroy my father," Dayenu, and the songs at the end—Echad Mi Yodea and Chad Gadya—were added later, in Ashkenaz.

The one book that is decorated. The manuscript haggadot of the fourteenth century—the Sarajevo, the Golden, the Birds' Head—are painted as no prayer book ever was: children sit at that table, and the book had to hold them. Printing began early; the Prague Haggadah of 5286 is the oldest printed one to survive entire, and its woodcuts were copied for two hundred years.

How many. Several thousand editions of the Haggadah are known—more than of any other Jewish book. In that one sees what it was: not a book for scholars but a book for the house.